LIBERTARIANS DEFINED

Remind me again why they’re considered the intellectuals of the Right ... Libertarians are basically just liberals with slightly larger vocabularies and even larger (and frequently less excusable) chips on their shoulders.

GLASGOW ATTACKED

Two men rammed a flaming Jeep Cherokee into the main terminal of Glasgow airport Saturday, crashing into the glass doors at the entrance in what appeared to be the third attempted terror attack on Britain in two days, witnesses said.

Police wrestled the two men to the ground - one of them engulfed in flames - arresting both and taking one to the hospital ...

Hundreds fled screaming from the terminal as one of the men poured gasoline over the Jeep and tried to force it further inside the terminal, one witness said.

APPEASE, SIR ROBERT

When Lord Ahmed was made a member of the House of Lords by Blair, he was paraded as a moderate Muslim voice. He sounded only fairly moderate when he said on television that “Sir Salman” was an outrage against Islam and that the government should have knighted journalist Robert Fisk instead.

He’d have been the first to win a knighthood for services to himself. Here’s Sir Robert on the death of Kurt Waldheim, in which the Nazi-linked former UN Secretary-General receives only passing mention:

All I could say ... I heard yesterday ... I spent months, years, investigating ... I remember ... I was at Amman airport ... I thought ...

It was an Austrian journalist who alerted me ... when I told her ... I recall finding ... I remember how I visited Bosnia ... I visited his former headquarters ... I even visited his interrogation office ...

I asked him what it felt like ... I have his words in my own handwriting as I write this ... When I left Bosnia ... my Waldheim investigations ... I called my foreign news editor ... I saw so many parallels ...

I believed a civil war would break out ... The local Serbs even abused me ... I did report the Bosnian war ...

I well remember ... I came across a second-hand copy of Waldheim’s memoirs ... I should add ...

All history revolves around Bob. This piece also sees the return of Fisk’s roarers:

"We’ll report it if it happens,” Barnes roared down the phone at me.

(Note the redundant “at me”.) Previous roaring appearances:

• Andrew Marr, when editor of The Independent, who first made me think about what was happening ... Andrew turned round and pointed across the city. “Something’s gone wrong with the bloody weather!” he roared.

• “Fisky,” he roars, “that really is the story of Lebanon. Aren’t we are all now ‘on the mosque side of the church’?"

Corrections and clarifications have never been a feature of Fisk’s reporting on Israel. Most notoriously, he has never properly repudiated the false claims made in his April 2002 articles on the Battle of Jenin in which, despite being in California at the time, he described the “stench of death wafting out from the Palestinian city” and accused “Israel’s undisciplined soldiery” of “running amok,” massacring “hundreds” and concealing the evidence from the world.

LANCET CONFIRMATION PENDING

The World Health Organization said Thursday that an estimated 77,000 deaths are recorded annually in the Asia-Pacific region due to health problems arising from global warming.

Is that what it says on their death certificates? “Hands slipped off steering wheel due to sweat brought about by global warming”? “Eaten by desperate polar bear”? “Breathed in near an American car”? It doesn’t matter, in a way; we’re all doomed eventually. Well, half of us are.

DAS BULK

Three weeks after it beached in savage storms, the stricken bulk carrier Pasha Bulker is just 5m closer to returning to sea.

And with industry sources estimating a cost of more than $200,000 for each day it stays stranded, those 5m have cost the Pasha Bulker’s Japanese owners Fukujin Kisen, or at least its insurance company, $4.2m – or $840,000 a metre.

But Newcastle is cashing in:

"The wave of tourism has been incredible, I’ve had to put on extra staff to cope with the crowds that come in,” Last Drop Cafe owner Monique Lee said.

"I’d be happy if they left it there as a permanent tourist attraction."

Newcastle City Council tourism manager Shawn Day said the economic benefits had been “huge”.

Which is why locals were possibly anxious, ahead of Thursday night’s rescue bid, that the Bulker stay a while longer:

Police blocked off parts of the city’s east yesterday as a safety precaution as residents crowded under any shelter they could find to watch.

Many residents had mixed feelings. One said, “That ship is like our new best friend."

BOMB DEFUSED

Police have defused a “potentially viable explosive device” in a car in Central London overnight raising fears of an attempted terrorist attack at the heart of the capital.

The device was found in the car parked in the Haymarket after a member of the public contacted officers at 2am with concerns about the suspicious vehicle.

Bomb disposal officers attended the scene to make the device safe, but the street remains closed along with the nearby Piccadilly Circus Tube station. The vehicle is expected to be taken away to the Forensic Explosives Laboratory in Kent for further tests.

It’s those pesky Presbyterians again, most likely. The usual strategy is for multiple blasts; other areas of London may be shut down for searches.

Police are now frantically searching landmark sites across the capital to check for further explosive devices. They are not sure whether the bomb was a lone device or more had been deployed across London.

UPDATE III. The bomb was “made of a lethal mix of gasoline, propane gas, and nails.” Something similar was planned three years ago:

British police ... said the incident echoed the “Gas Limos Project”, a major al Qaeda plot foiled in 2004.

Convicted Islamist militant Dhiren Barot, who was jailed last year, admitted he had been planning to explode gas and explosives packed into limousines or other large vehicles in underground car parks in co-ordinated attacks across Britain.

British authorities were seeking three men Friday after police defused two car bombs that they said could have caused “significant injury or loss of life” in London.

The three men are believed to be from the Birmingham area, a center of radical Islamic unrest in Britain, U.S. officials who had been briefed on the developments told NBC News.

UPDATE VII. SMH headline: “London streets closed in panic over bombs”. A German visiting London tells the NYT: “There are millions of people here, people are walking around, nobody looks too frightened, I don’t think anybody is staying at home, or tourists are staying in their hotels. They always say that Londoners just take it as it comes, they don’t get nervous. English people are like that anyway, they just sort of mind their own business, they don’t get in a panic.” (Via Alan R.M. Jones)

Thursday, June 28, 2007

HONESTY IN POLITICS

The NSW Treasurer, Michael Costa, has called Tim Flannery an “idiot” ...

Mr Costa, a renowned climate change sceptic, made his comments in question time in the Legislative Council, saying the environmental campaigner Mr Flannery was wrong to say that dams were going to dry up because of climate change.

These people do not understand climate cycles. When it comes to the climate they are alarmists and cannot see beyond the end of their noses. They create division, panic and fear so that they can rustle up a few naïve people to vote for them at election time. Climates change. If there is one constant about climates, it is that they change. I do not mean that they are changing now; but they have changed over history. We will continue to see climates change, and rain cycles will vary from drought, to normality, to heavy rainfall incidents. That is the reality of the world ...